We owe efficient factories, which turn out hundreds of products an hour, for the consumer culture that we presently live within. Each well-oiled factory has enabled us to produce and consume more, sharing more wealth and possessions with a larger and larger middle class. And those production lines have relied upon technology to produce their goods – tech that’s always improving, upgrading, and evolving as time goes on. Here are three of the major technological features seen across many of the world’s most production factories.
Smart Sensors
The internet of things has long been heralded as a game-changer for businesses, manufacturers, and transportation. While there is slow progress in some domains, the area in which there is significant progress is that of the internet-connected smart sensor. These help factories keep on top of happenings on their lines, including any issues that might arise that could knock their production out of action for a certain number of hours or even days.
Sensors can also help pick up on how many products the line is producing an hour, so that accurate supply and demand calculations can be made for producers to sell their products on, at a certain price, to retailers or consumers. Over time, and with software to help them track their progress, factories can make efficiency savings using smart sensors that save them cash.
Conveyor Belts
These marvelous contraptions are hardly new, but they’re utterly fundamental to how factories produce their goods. Without them, humans would have to carry parts of products from place to place, like a nest of ants. Things would quickly become confused, and workers would become exhausted at all the heavy lifting they had to perform. Far better to have conveyors, some of the latest of which can be found at Fluent Conveyors.
Conveyor belts are continually improving and upgrading as technology becomes more and more refined. In today’s world, conveyors don’t just transport products or parts from A to B – they can also do exciting things with those products. Think, for instance, of the conveyors that help shuffle goods into position for the next machine to pick up and operate upon.
Automation
The exciting rise of automation has been felt first in the factory too. It’s here that robotic arms have been operating for some time, programmed as they are to perform one single function incredibly efficiently. But automation in the modern era is more about machine learning and AI than it is about a robotic arm performing one function.
It’s in this sense that production lines are getting smarter. Using more machine intelligence than ever before, they’re able to learn on the job, with robotic arms not following an algorithm, but instead understanding the pieces and parts they’re interacting with so that they can work faster and respond to unpredictable changes to the line without causing major disruption when something inevitably goes wrong somewhere else on the line.
With these machines and technologies making production every-faster, it’s this tech that you’ll find in all the world’s leading factories.
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